No Beast So Fierce (7 page)

I answered four that morning. One was filled. Another was a giant firm that required employees to be bonded and I walked out without making an application. Two others needed salesmen—but needed a man with an automobile, and neither of them had a guarantee or advances while the salesman learned. I had neither car nor money to tide me over.

I'd walked three miles from office to office. My feet, after so many years of prison brogans, were unaccustomed to low-cut shoes. Blisters the size of half dollars, puffed with fluid, had formed on each Achilles tendon. When I reached the branch parole office on West Olympic Boulevard I was limping severely. Adding to my discomfort was ferocious heat beginning to press its fist on the Los Angeles basin.

The building housing the parole office was inconspicuous. Only the lettering on the tinted glass door—Department of Corrections, Community Services Division—set it off from being a small medical building. The waiting room had bare, hard benches, and was empty. A receptionist announced me and pressed a button. The door to the office area buzzed as the electrically operated door was freed. The sound made me wince inwardly. Beyond the door I would be in custody.

Rosenthal stood in a short corridor beyond, framed in a doorway with a pool of sunlight spilling around his legs. He was coatless and his short-sleeved shirt exposed a carpet of coarse black hair on his forearms. “Come on in,” he said. “I was worried you'd run. You were pretty nervous last night.”

“If I'd known about your electric doors I might've skipped. Something like that is frightening. I feel like I'm in a police station.”

“Oh, those … not my idea. Have a seat.”

“I can use that gate money.”

Rosenthal shuffled through papers on his desk. “Here we are,” he said, handing over the check.

I held it up. “Thirty dollars for eight years. Not much per annum.”

“Society doesn't even owe you that.”

“It isn't much to start a new life with.”

“Try feeling more penitent and less the martyr.”

“I'm sorry, I don't feel anything but a little bitter … and I'm trying to suppress that.”

“So, what'd you do last night?”

I had a lie waiting in ambush for the question. “Visited friends, saw a girl.”

“You stay with her?”

“No, in a hotel.”

“That's pretty expensive for someone in your position.”

“Not this hotel.”

Rosenthal tilted his chair and propped his feet on the desk. He laced stubby fingers into a web behind his neck and watched me with candid intensity. He chomped gum placidly. Tension grew with the silence.

“I'm less than satisfied with your attitude,” he said, “and about how you're starting out. First you don't want the halfway house, next you run around all night. It isn't a good start, not at all. It's your attitude, your outlook.”

I flushed, wanting to protest, but snipped off the hot words. Confrontation with authority was a game I'd played often, and I knew its unfairness. If I argued, Rosenthal could put me in jail (unless I knocked him down and escaped), write a report saying whatever he wanted, and I'd be riding a bus with barred windows back to prison. There would be no hearing, no appeal, and I wouldn't even see what he wrote. So I checked myself, and decided that a plea for reason might get through.

“I'm sorry, if you think that,” I said. “I'm trying to be forthright and sincere. Tell me what I've done wrong.”

“It's your attitude. I keep telling you that. You act like you're free, can do what you damn well please. You're not free. You're still in
custodia legis
, a legal prisoner being allowed to serve part of your term outside on parole. Besides that, you've got a long, long record of mismanaging your life. And you should feel some remorse for what you've done.”

“Eight years for bad checks should clean the slate.” I saw the flippancy in the words after they were out. Rosenthal's face soured. He was obviously a moralist and outraged by my file. He knew more about me than anyone should know about another. Yet the words in the file were less than the whole of me. Nothing there showed that I was human.

“Look, I'm thirty-one years old. I've got more gray hair than you. I hope I'm old enough to make some decisions, at least where to sleep. If I didn't learn that much in prison it was a waste.”

“It protected society. That's my job, too, my first job.”

“They let me out. I want to stay out. You don't have to be on my back. You're doing a better job if you help me, aren't you? I want to be a decent human being. I might not understand what it means exactly the way most people do.”

I paused, struggling to channel the tumult into words, sweat on my forehead and under my arms. “You've got to realize I'm not like you. I'm too warped and tangled by too many yesterdays to be like you. This doesn't mean I'm fated to be a menace to society. If I believed my future had to be like my past, I'd kill myself. I'm tired. I can bend enough to stay within the law, but I'm never going to be the guy who goes home to San Fernando Valley to a wife and kids. I wish I was that guy, but I'm not. And your threats aren't going to hold me. Threats instill fury, not fear.”

“Nobody is threatening you,” Rosenthal said. “I'm just telling you the realities of the situation, what you must adjust to.”

“It sounds like threats.”

“I'm here to help you with your problems.”

“By giving me ‘thou shalt' and ‘thou shalt not'.”

“I don't make the parole conditions. I just enforce them. I can't give you a license to break the rules even if I wanted to. I wouldn't have a job very long if I did.”

“Bend a little and I'll bend a little. Just ask that I don't commit any crimes, not that I live by your moral standards. If society demands that, society shouldn't have put me in foster homes and reform schools and twisted me. And these last eight years. Shit, after that, nobody would be normal. Just understand my predicament. I don't know anyone but ex-convicts, hustlers, and prostitutes. I don't even feel comfortable around squarejohns. I like call girls instead of nice girls. I don't need a Freudian explanation, which wouldn't change the fact anyway. But because I prefer going to bed with a prostitute doesn't mean I'm going to use an acetylene torch on a safe.”

“It means you want permission to be a pimp.”

“No! No! I just want you to understand that you can't reduce persons to formulas.” I stopped to gather breath and select intelligible words from the bewildering thoughts rotating through my mind. “In essence, I'm asking you not to make this parole a leash that chokes me.”

“In essence, you want to do what you want to do, right?”

My stomach sank. Rosenthal was unmoved. I'd tried. Rivulets of sweat trickled down my torso. An awful thought geysered up. What if Rosenthal was right? What if blindly following the rules was the path to happiness and inner peace? Could a person alone, even if certain, be right? Maybe Rosenthal had sight of me while I was blinding myself with words. To think thus was placing a foot over the abyss. I drew back to the firm ground of hidden indignation. I'd tried to be honest and the motherfucker wasn't to be trusted. Now I'd use deceit.

Rosenthal watched me, a Giaconda smile on his fat lips, eyes gleaming, jaws working the gum. “Let's quit the bullshit and get down to cases,” he said. “I'm going to tell you what I expect of you.”

I nodded acceptance.

“I'm not putting you in a halfway house,” he said, “simply because they're full. I think it'd be best, but I can't do anything. You've got a narcotic history so I'm putting you on nalline testing. Here's a form for you to sign.” He reached toward a drawer.

“I haven't taken a shot of heroin since I was nineteen.”

“If there is any history of narcotics of any kind—marijuana, pills, whatever, the subject goes on nalline testing.” He slid the form and a ballpoint pen across the table. The form declared that I volunteered to participate in the nalline antinarcotic testing program. I signed the form, but I seethed. He told me that I was to report to the nalline center between noon and six-thirty on Friday, and gave me a slip of paper with the address.

“Now,” he said, “what about a job?”

“I'm looking,” I said.

“Someone in authority where you work must be informed that you're on parole.”

The words make me sick to my stomach. I'd counted on being able to hide my past, be different by having others think me different. The enormity of the order stunned me. “How can I get a decent job under those circumstances?”

“It's the rules. This is the day you start doing your parole.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “We have to break this off. I'm due in court this afternoon. When you find a place to live, leave the address with the girl outside.” Rosenthal reached for his coat and ushered me outside. On the way he told me why he was going to court. He'd gone to pick up a parolee who'd missed nalline testing. On the way to the nalline center the parolee had reached into his pocket and surrendered a ten-dollar balloon of heroin. It was sad, Rosenthal said, because the man had two prior narcotic convictions and would mandatorily not be eligible for parole for fifteen years. The man was forty-six years old now.

I said nothing. I felt no sorrow for the man who'd played the fool so grossly. Nor was I angry at Rosenthal, who'd done precisely what I'd expected of him. He was more blind than me. I could see me through his eyes, but the empathy was unreciprocated. If I succeeded it would be in spite of him.

On the sidewalk, I felt pressed down by the heat. I had to find a room and sleep. The pills were wearing off and the delayed exhaustion was doubly intense. And the weight of the parole was growing into an albatross around my neck. And I had to comply with it or go back to prison. “Bastard,” I muttered, “cocksuckin', motherfuckin', bastard.”

5

I
RENTED
a room in a third-rate resident hotel near Seventh and Alvarado Streets, a neighborhood of decaying brick apartment buildings and Victorian mansions turned into boarding houses. This was an area of transient poor and near poor, alcoholics (not quite winos), pensioners, ten-dollar whores, junkies, and hustlers down on their luck. All were abundantly served by pawn shops, bars, and strip joints. I chose the neighborhood not because of the atmosphere, nor the cheap rents, though that was considered, but because it was easier to get around town from here than anywhere else. Downtown Los Angeles was twenty minutes away, and Hollywood half an hour by bus; these were the likely places to find a job.

I selected the particular small hotel because it had no desk clerk. Rosenthal would be unable to question my hours. A lifetime of furtiveness, plus my distrust of the parole officer, made this a prime consideration. The room had a sink, but the bathroom was down a hallway. The carpet was threadbare, but compared to bare concrete it felt luxurious. The window opened to a passage between the hotel and the brick wall of a garage. Leaning from the window, I examined the ten-foot drop as a possible escape route—then laughed at what I was doing.

My feet were throbbing. The blisters were swelling. I took off the ugly shoes and went downstairs barefoot to call the parole office and leave my address. Then I went upstairs. The day sizzled outside, a heat so intense it befuddled the mind. When I slept, sweating, I dreamed of drowning in the Sargasso Sea, pulled down by greenish-yellow seaweed. When I woke up the sweat had been chilled by the breeze. It was twilight and I was hungry. I was also refreshed from the sleep, so that after eating the special at a neighborhood café I decided to go for a walk and stop to buy toiletries.

The blisters kept it from being a long walk. After two blocks I decided to go back, but by a different route. On Eighth Street I started for a liquor store to buy a cigar. An old man came out. He wore the uniform of lost old men: baggy khaki pants and drab olive sweater. He walked stooped and crablike, but too firmly to be a wino. Yet a paper bag was in his hand, gripped by the neck of the bottle within. The bottle was answer to a lonely furnished room, to meals eaten alone at a fountain counter or cafeteria. Such old men gravitated to these neighborhoods, survived on company pensions, social security, insurance—but they were all alone, and lonely.

The old man brought memories of my father. He'd been fifty-two years old when my mother died bearing me. Four years later he was invalided with the first of many heart attacks. Ours was a family without relatives or close friends, so at the age of four I was taken before my first court, declared to be a needy child, and made a ward of the county. The county placed me in a foster home, and my father began the slow process of dying in convalescent homes and furnished rooms. From the very outset, I was a troublemaker—runaway, prone to tantrums, thief. If this behavior had any purpose, I was too young to articulate it, nor do I remember what I felt. Later my feelings were mingled—hatred for authority, loneliness, yearning to love. By then the state—or society—was committed to breaking the rebelliousness. By the time I was ten years old the circle was welded closed.

My father was never an important figure in my childhood, just an old, stooped man in khakis and sweater who visited the foster homes and juvenile hall. I remember begging him to take me home and was unable to understand how someone could be “too sick” if they were on their feet. Sick meant in bed. While on the runaway from juvenile hall with Gino, I went to his furnished room after spending three nights sleeping in a gutted automobile in a wrecking yard. He wanted to turn me in and I ran away from him and hated him. It was the last time I turned to him for help. Now I understand that he had sacrificed to give me clothes better than those the county provided and books when I developed the urge to read. But he was never a strong influence in my life. I grew up alone.